The lifetime of the computer has been marked by an ongoing struggle to communicate with the machine. A move away from “interactive responses” and toward “dialogue,” however, entails more than just a shift in thinking away from menus and keyword detection. Cognitive ergonomics is a design philosophy recognizing that just as an ergonomic keyboard might bend so that the user’s wrists do not have to, a system’s design should bend so that the user’s natural processes for accomplishing a task do not have to.